5 ways researchers are using smart financial data to better understand growth & productivity, economic wellbeing, health inequities and homelessness
The Financial Data Service (FINDS), operated by Smart Data Foundry and the University of Edinburgh, is part of Smart Data Research UK’s (SDR UK) family of data services. Each data service has a specialist focus for the data they collect and share with researchers, though we all contribute towards SDR UKs themes of Productivity and Prosperity, Health and Wellbeing, Digital Society and Sustainability.
The projects highlighted below show how smart financial data is being used for research which will ultimately inform policy across productivity, prosperity, health & wellbeing as well as helping to develop on-the-ground approaches to real socioeconomic challenges. One thing they have in common is that financial data is not used in isolation – whether it’s combined with survey responses, lived experience, or administrative data on health and housing, smart financial data is a powerful tool to complement traditional approaches and official statistics.
Smart data provides:
- Large sample sizes in the 100,000s or millions, enabling geographically granular research at a scale surveys cannot support.
- Collected in real-time and made available for research in weeks rather than months or years
- Available for individuals and businesses, capturing real financial behaviours in response to economic events.
How researchers are using smart financial data:
1. Understanding the impact of increasing the National Living Wage (NLW) and Employer’s National Insurance Contributions (NICs)
Prof. Paul Mizen of King’s College London is leading a project using smart financial data from SMEs to explore the effects of NLW and NICs increases on small firms, measured by their response (higher prices, lower profit margins, lower employment). This will help policymakers such as the Low Pay Commission and the Bank of England to understand wage pressures in the labour market and inflation. This project is one of 5 FINDS Fellowship projects funded by FINDS and SDR UK.
Learn more about labour market and productivity data.
2. Linking survey data and smart financial data to understand local living standards and regional inequalities
Regional inequality is often ranked as the most significant form of inequality and is traditionally measured by income data, but this measure does not capture the living standards this income affords people in different parts of the country. Researchers at the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) and Economic and Statistics Centre of Excellence (ESCOE) recently published a working paper assessing whether local expenditure data can act as a better measure of household resources than income data or productivity data alone, and its potential to inform future research and policy on regional inequality and living standards..
Read more about the IFS study here.
3. Researching the links between homes, heat and healthy kids.
Cold, damp homes are strongly linked to poor respiratory health in children, but efforts to fix this through retrofitting can create new problems if not properly understood. Dr Olivia Swann, a paediatrician and data scientist at the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute, leads the Homes, Heat and Healthy Kids Study, a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project assessing whether linking health, housing, energy and financial data can reveal not just whether a home is warm, but how it's kept warm. By combining health records, prepayment smart meter data, financial transaction data from FINDS, and social housing sensor data on humidity and mould risk, the study aims to identify which retrofit approaches genuinely protect children's health, and its potential to inform future policy on housing, energy and child health outcomes.
Read Livvy’s interview with SDR UK Director Joe Cuddeford.
4. Researching the impact of unexpected housing and energy cost shocks on financial vulnerability.
Financial resilience is increasingly strained by volatile housing and energy costs, yet little is known about how these shocks translate into changing patterns of financial vulnerability over time. Professor Gbenga Ibikunle from the University of Edinburgh is using anonymised transactions data from FINDS to model how housing and energy cost shocks affect financial resilience, characterising how financial vulnerability evolves in order to inform better policy interventions and the development of products by financial services companies to address it.
Prof. Gbenga Ibikunle is an SDR UK Research Fellow, read more about his work here.
5. Developing early indicators of homelessness to improve prevention.
Homelessness is rarely a sudden event, with financial pressures often building long before someone loses their home - yet services can struggle to spot and act on these early warning signs. The Homelessness Data Lab, established by The Royal Foundation’s Homewards' programme, brings together 25 organisations across business, government, local authorities and the homelessness sector to explore how data and technology can close this gap. Smart Data Foundry (FINDS) is contributing to the initiative by providing five Homewards partner locations with access to its Economic Wellbeing Explorer, a tool that draws on anonymised data from an innovative partnership with NatWest Group to show localised, near real-time trends in financial vulnerability, helping local authorities and NGOs build a clearer picture of economic pressure in their communities and enabling earlier, more coordinated responses to those at risk of losing their homes.
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